Professor Reith visits EMT-students at UC Davis

Thanks to a cooperation agreement signed at the beginning of the year 2018, students of the EMT department were able to complete their practical semester for the first time in the winter semester of 2018/19 in California in scientific working groups of UC Davis. During his current visit Professor Dirk Reith had the opportunity to personally examine the atmosphere and working conditions of the students.

The collaboration, initially focused on the Department of Chemical Engineering, was also extended to the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in autumn 2017 as part of a guest professorship of Professor Reith. And thus the colleague of this department, Professor Barbara Linke, who had her habilitation in Aachen, was being convinced of including the two mechanical engineering students Maja Beltz and Sebastian Quaisser should be in their "Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainable Technologies Research (MASTeR)". This is mainly about the understanding of mechanical machining processes, mainly grinding, in terms of energy and rejection efficiency.

In the working group of Professor Adam Moule, the students Jakob Lorek and Andreas Soika were mainly occupied with building up a "Blade Coater" independently. With this device, it should be possible to coat small glass panes particularly uniformly and thinly with polymers, which can then be examined very precisely in later work steps.

In various conversations with his American colleagues and students, Dirk Reith's main concern was to examine the organizational and content-related process for improvement potential. As a highlight, it could be stated that in all probability in both working groups even scientific publications will be created due to the collaboration. Therefore, the one-week stay was a great success, both in terms of science and in terms of international cooperation.